View a recording of the lecture by Dr Tobias Stål – October 2024
This talk was part of the 2024 PhD Showcase held on 6 October 2024.
Dr Tobias Stål, winner of the 2023 RST Doctoral (PhD) Award, is a geophysicist focusing on understanding Antarctica’s deep and shallow structure and properties. He completed his PhD at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania in 2021. The focus of his PhD research was a study of the Antarctic lithosphere revealed by multivariate analysis.
The Antarctic continent, with an area of about 14 million km2, is larger than Australia; yet due to the ice cover and inaccessibility, its geology and lithospheric structure are to a large extent unknown. Advancing our understanding of the Antarctic continent addresses fundamental knowledge gaps in plate tectonics and understanding the interactions between the solid Earth and the cryosphere.
Dr Stål’s PhD research addressed challenging topics, such as the identification of sub-ice lithospheric boundaries, and the determination of a new geothermal heat flow model for the continent of Antarctica. The research was enabled by innovations in computational and statistical methodologies, including the development of a new software library to enable the multivariate approaches that were ground-breaking for Antarctica.
Since graduating, Dr Stål has taken up a Research Associate position in computation physics at the School of Natural Sciences, funded by the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence in Antarctic Science.
